As a part of our web-site redesign, we’ve moved our git repositories to GitHub. You can see all of the repositories using this link: http://github.com/boundarydevices The most active at the moment are: Linux on i.MX6, branch boundary-imx-android-r13.2. U-Boot on i.MX6, branch boundary-imx-android-r13.2 As you can probably guess from the branch names, these were based on [...]
Welcome to our redesigned website!
Welcome to our redesigned website. We hope you will enjoy all of the new features that have been added. Over the next few weeks, we will be adding more content so check back soon.
U-Boot conventions for i.MX6 (Nitrogen6X and SabreLite)
A little convention make things easy to use, but only if you know the convention. In this blog post, we’ll explain three key environment variable conventions used on the Nitrogen6X (and Sabre Lite before it). For the impatient: Both of these devices ship with U-Boot configured to load and run a boot script named 6q_upgrade [...]
Revisiting LTIB and Qt on i.MX51 and i.MX53
In a previous post, we walked through the process of building Qt using the LTIB tool, but we were a bit cavalier about the steps involved. Since that time, we’ve been shipping demo software based on LTIB and Qt with our Nitrogen53 and Nitrogenboards, and the lack of documentation shows. In order to remedy that [...]
Booting into your own application on Android
Here’s another favorite for fixed-point Android users. How do we skip the home screen and go directly into our own custom application on system start? Once again, this is an easy change to make, and we really don’t even have to mess with the framework code to make it work. If you have any Android [...]
i2c-tools under Android
While working with a multi-touch display under Android recently, I had some questions about what data was being received from the touch screen, which is connected to our Nitrogen53 board over i2c. My early debug steps involved instrumenting the kernel, but I really wanted the quicker cycle time of the i2c-tools package. It turns out [...]
Disabling sleep mode on Android
Android’s user-focused, touchscreen-driven interface lends itself well to fixed-point applications such as kiosks and control panels. However, since it was originally designed for mobile devices, there are a few features that need to be tweaked. For example, Android puts itself to sleep after a certain amount of inactivity. You may not want your device to [...]
Set Android default orientation to portrait mode
The default screen orientation for the Android-ready Nitrogen and Nitrogen53 is landscape. That’s fine for most people, but say you want it in portrait. Or upside down, or whatever. That’s a problem, since Android usually takes rotation instructions from code that expects motion sensor input, and since most Nitrogen use cases don’t need the board [...]
How to write an Android camera app
Now that we’ve covered the internals, we can talk a little about how the surface application should look. As a reference we’ll use the AOSP’s own default Camera app; you can find the source here. It’s a lot of code, so we’ll do a lot of skipping through looking for the important stuff that you [...]
Camera subsystem overview for i.MX Gingerbread
That’s kind of how I felt as a naive software intern thumbing through the vast amount of information in the Android source code. There’s a lot to take in: Android covers an enormous set of use cases, and it follows a secure and extensible model that requires function calls to dive through layer after layer [...]